Posts Tagged ‘days’

A bitter cold wave covered northern Vietnam on Sunday, lashing it with rain and cold northeasterly winds. The National Hydro Meteorological Forecasting Center predicted these conditions would last for a further ten days.

The temperature has dropped to less than 8-9 degrees Celsius in Hanoi and remained below 0 degree Celsius in the mountainous provinces of Lang Son and Cao Bang.

The northern provinces of the central region have also suffered bitter cold winds.

It is expected that the biting cold weather will prevail over northern Vietnam on January 11 and 14 and icy and snowy conditions may cover the Mau Son mountaintop and also other places in the mountainous region.

The entire belt from Da Nang to the southern part of the central region has been affected by this bitter cold wave.

Meanwhile, the Central Highlands and southern regions will continue to experience extreme cold at night and during the early hour of morning. The prevailing temperatures will hover around 18-20 degrees Celsius.

The body of a murdered man was found Monday on the main highway to Acapulco, bringing to 31 the number of people killed in the Pacific resort city over four days.

The unidentified man was shot several times in the head and found under a pedestrian bridge with his shirt pulled over his face, said Fernando Monreal Leyva, director of the investigative police for Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located.

Leyva said federal, state and local police planned to meet Monday with the military to consider ways to beef up security in Acapulco, where 14 decapitated men and two police officers were among the unusually high body count since Friday evening.

Fatigues with an embroidered logo of the La Familia drug cartel is presented to the media along with weaponry, drugs and cars confiscated in an operation in Morelia January 10, 2011

Most of the killings occurred in just a few hours from Friday night to Saturday in non-tourist areas of the city. But the officers were shot to death in front of tourists on Avenida Costero Miguel Aleman, the hotel-lined thoroughfare that runs along the bay.

Drug violence has increased in southern Guerrero state as factions of the Beltran Leyva cartel began fighting for territory after leader Arturo Beltran Leyva was killed by Mexican marines in December 2009.

Messages left with the 14 decapitated men said they were killed by “El Chapo’s People,” a reference to the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Leyva would not say whether the notes indicated Sinaloa had joined the fight.

The decapitations were the largest single group found in Mexico in recent years. In 2008, a group of 12 decapitated bodies were piled outside the Yucatan state capital of Merida. The same year, nine headless men were discovered in Guerrero’s capital, Chilpancingo.

Among the other Acapulco victims, six people were shot and stuffed into a taxi, their hands and feet bound.

More than 30,000 people have died in drug violence nationwide since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on cartels after taking office in December 2006 by deploying thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug hotspots.

Alejandro Poire, the government spokesman for security issues, said Monday that the increase in violence in Acapulco shows most of the killings in Mexico are a result of turf fights between drug gangs.

“They are vying for a place that, from the point of view of local drug sales, is extremely important,” Poire said.

Also Monday, the mayor of a town in central Mexico was shot to death as he drove with his wife and son, authorities said.

Abraham Ortiz Rosales, mayor of Temoac in Morelos state, was shot once in the head near the town of Jantetelco, said Morelos state Attorney General Pedro Benitez. Benitez said police had not determined a motive.

Ortiz Rosales had been threatened in June by men carrying assault rifles but the motive for that incident was never made public.

The extremely cold weather in the northern provinces will last several more days as another cold front is set to move in by Sunday, according to the national weather bureau.

Hanoi suffers from the cold weather at only 10 degree Celsius on December 6 (Photo: Thanh Nien)

In the next few days, the prevalent temperature will remain low at 8-13 degrees Celsius in Hanoi and the adjacent provinces. In the mountanoius areas, it will only be 5-9 degrees Celsius.

The current cold front, affecting the northern region over the last two days, has spread to the central part of the central region causing medium rain on Friday morning.

Within the day, it will move in the region’s southern part.

Meanwhile, Bui Minh Tang, director of the National Hydro Meteorological Forecasting Center said that one more cold front is predicted to overflow Vietnam on January 12 and 13.

As a result, northern provinces will continue to experience very cold weather until at least January 15 and even encounter some ice and frost.

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Cao Duc Phat, has sent an urgent dispatch to northern and central provinces, asking them to carry out precautionary measures in order to protect the herds of cattle, from the cold weather.

Nguyen Xuan Duong, deputy head of the Department of Livestock Production of the ministry in, has asked officials from the various provinces to try to prevent cattle from dying due to the cold weather.

The “Ho Chi Minh City Days in Pusan ” festival opened at the Pusan Cultural Centre in the Republic of Korea , on October 14, with a special show to mark the 15 th anniversary of both municipalities becoming sister cities.

Vietnam ’s Ambassador to the RoK Tran Trong Toan underlined the growing relationship the two sister cities have had over the past few years.

He highlighted the efforts made by the authorities and people of both cities to develop their friendship and cooperation, including the important role played by Vietnam ’s consul general in Pusan and Kyeongnam, the RoK’s consul general in HCM City as well as friendship organisations, businesses and individuals from both cities.

Leaders from both cities spoke highly of the fruitful results of bilateral relations and discussed plans for cooperating further in the future during the talks, within the framework of the festival.

A series of cooperative agreements signed by both municipal authorities has helped to promote political, economic, and cultural activities between both cities.

They have also exchanged delegations to share their experiences in developing and managing the real estate market, transportation, post and telecoms. They also debated how districts from both cities could cooperate more effectively.

First established in November 1995, the relationship between HCM City and Pusan is considered the most dynamic twinning between Vietnam and the RoK.

The festival is a regular and rotated activity between both countries to promote bilateral political, economic and cultural cooperation.

KABUL, Oct 15, 2010 (AFP) – A foreign soldier fighting the Afghan insurgency was killed by a Taliban-style bomb Friday, NATO said as it announced that another soldier died from injuries sustained in a similar attack a day earlier.

The deaths bring to 16 the number of foreign soldiers — at least six of them Americans — to have died in the war since Wednesday, according to an AFP tally.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said a “service member died following an improvised explosive device attack in southern Afghanistan today”. It did not give further details.

There are more than 150,000 international troops deployed in Afghanistan trying to defeat a Taliban-led insurgency aimed at toppling the country’s Western-backed democracy.

The rebels have stepped up attacks every year since the Taliban regime was toppled in a US-led invasion in late 2001.

To root out the rebels, Washington deployed an extra 30,000 reinforcements this year as the basis of a surge strategy aimed at speeding an end to the war. About 10,000 more NATO troops were also deployed.

This year, the deadliest yet for foreign forces, 590 NATO-led soldiers have been killed, according to a toll based on that kept by the independent icasualties.org website, compared to 521 killed last year.

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2010 (AFP) – The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster reached the 100-day mark Wednesday with hopes high that BP is finally on the verge of permanently sealing its ruptured Macondo well.

But years of legal wrangles and probes lie ahead and myriad questions remain about the long-term effects of the massive oil spill on wildlife, the environment and the livelihoods of Gulf residents.

Ships assist in clean up and containment near the source of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill July 27, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana.AFP

If BP needs a reminder of the long legal road ahead as it tries to rebuild its reputation, one will be provided on Thursday as lawyers at a session in Boise, Idaho set the stage for a potential trial of the century.

Proceedings will examine whether complaints from around 200 plaintiffs can be consolidated and give trial lawyers a test run of the arguments they will make during what could be years of legal action.

US officials were anxious to avoid being too optimistic ahead of next week’s crucial operations and cautioned that a mountain of work lay ahead to clean up oiled shorelines and pick up some 20 million feet (3,800 miles) of boom.

“I would characterize this as the first 100 days. There’s a lot of work in front of us,” said Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, the on-scene coordinator. “We are not out of the woods yet, we still need a permanent kill.”

BP aims to start the “static kill” on Monday, pumping heavy drilling mud and cement down through the cap at the top of the well that has sealed it for the past two weeks.

Five days later a relief well should intercept the damaged well, allowing engineers to check the success of the “static kill” and cement in the area between the drill pipe and the well bore.

This so-called “bottom kill” should finally plug the reservoir once and for all, but it will not answer how the catastrophe was allowed to occur and who is responsible.

While the last surface patches of toxic crude biodegrade rapidly in the warm waters of the Gulf, the long-term impact of what is thought to be the biggest accidental oil spill ever may not be realized for decades.

As the focus shifts to the clean-up in the marshes and beaches of the Gulf coast, so it does to the US Justice Department investigation and state probes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that a team has been established to examine whether the notoriously close ties between BP and federal regulators contributed to the April 20 disaster.

The “BP squad” will also probe rig operator Transocean and Halliburton, the oil services company which had finished cementing the well only 20 hours before the rig exploded, the Post reported.

BP announced Tuesday it would replace gaffe-prone British chief executive Tony Hayward with Bob Dudley, an American, in a bid to repair its tattered US reputation.

It also posted a quarterly loss of 16.9 billion dollars and set aside 32.2 billion dollars to pay spill costs, including a 20 billion dollar fund to pay compensation to the battered fishing, oil, and tourism industries.

Once the well is sealed, US spill chief Thad Allen plans to shift resources to focus on picking up boom, cleaning oiled shores and testing for any hidden underwater plumes.

To that end he has called a meeting on Thursday morning with parish presidents to discuss the redeployment of the army of local conscripts.

Sophisticated underwater operations involving fleets of robotic submarines at brain-crunching depths will make way for the less glamorous but equally complex work of Shoreline Clean-up Assessment Teams, SCATs for short.

They will sign off mile-by-mile on the 638 miles (1,027 kilometers) of Gulf Coast where oil has washed ashore.

The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up, but cleaning up the maze of marshes, where there is nothing to stand on and shallow-bottomed boats are needed to navigate the narrow channels, is a logistical nightmare.

Geologist Ed Owens, a world authority on protecting shorelines from oil spills contracted to BP, told AFP on Monday that the marshes should recover in months and the impact of the oil was “quite small.”

But other leading scientists have warned of a decades-long effect on marine life that could lead to a shift in the overall biological network in the Gulf of Mexico.